Efficiently managing location information with privacy requirements in Wi-Fi networks: a middleware approach

The growing availability of wireless portable devices is leveraging the diffusion of location based services (LBSs) that provide service contents depending on the current position of clients, servers, and involved distributed resources. When a wide public of final users use LBSs, two primary issues are crucial: how to guarantee the proper level of user privacy given the need to disclose, to some extent, client location information; how to effectively manage the exchange of positioning information (and of its variations) notwithstanding the high heterogeneity of connectivity technologies and device hardware/software capabilities. The paper presents the privacy-related extension of our proxy-based mobile agent middleware to support personalized service provisioning to Wi-Fi portable devices, in particular, our middleware prototype adopts a two-level proxy-based architecture to provide LBSs with middleware-mediated effective access to location data, which are exposed at the proper level of granularity depending on privacy/efficiency requirements dynamically negotiated between clients and LBSs.